Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday September 29, 2010 @10:57AM
from the stranger-than-fiction dept.

eldavojohn writes "You might be used to the idea that game reviewers receive games free and ahead of time, but Ars opens up a darker side to the mystery box. Like a $200 check from Dante's Inferno, reading, 'by cashing this check you succumb to avarice by hoarding filthy lucre, but by not cashing it, you waste it, and thereby surrender to prodigality.' Or how about a huge-ass sword from Darksiders. Or brass knuckles (illegal in some states) from the makers of Mafia II. Or rancid, rotting meat mixed with spent shell casings, teeth, broken glasses and dog tags from Bulletstorm. NCSoft gave out flight suits and trips to weightlessness. Nintendo apparently likes to send all manner of food, including elaborate cakes shaped as their consoles and games. Squeeballs sent a crate of stuffed animals. iPods from Activision and Zunes from Microsoft seem to be pretty tame bait for reviewers ... but there's one reason why this continues to happen: more news-starved review sites and blogs report on the extras and the publisher's game gets spread around just a wee bit more. Even if it is as freakish as bracelets from an insane asylum spattered with blood." I think we must be doing it wrong around here... we usually can't even get games before the release date, much less get free rotting meat.

Metacritic [metacritic.com]. Only aggregates the reviews, weights by ratings (and it does normalize it, refusing to accept common practice among reviewers to use 50% as minimal score) and publishes the final score.

I don't know how you mean that, as in good or bad, but in case of good; I want gamplay, mutherfscker, I couldn't care less about gimmick shit like that.

Yes gamer of the very first commercial hour (read pong, Wolfenstein3D and PacMan), but games these days are movies.

Call me frustrated all you want, but games used to be tools to entertain yourself with, like chess, but today games are made to entertain you instead. No wonder multiplayer is so popular these day, but oh well...

I'll get off your lawn in a minute here... I've been a (video) gamer since ET was a new release on the Atari, which means I started about ten years after you I guess, but your comment reads like you're just pining for the good old days when you had to plug your console in uphill both ways. You can still play Pong and PacMan or various other simple games (the one thing you can say Flash has going for it, in fact), and Wolfenstein3D was just a predecessor to the current crop of FPSs.

Oh I don't mean to be like "Get of my lawn!", but what I mean is things like puzzles. Modern singleplayer games suck, I agree, althought there are exceptions but not many. But take a look at Portal for example; great game. It depends on how well you can think. Now take a look at the interactive Uncharted 2; great addictive game, sure, but it's basicaly a click-through (or button press next next next) movie.

Oh and I have nothing against a great story movie driver game. Take for example Metal Gear Solid; one

As someone who works at a healthcare company, this amuses me. Up till not too long ago, we didn't have a lot of rules on this sort of promotion in our industry. There is some now in terms of doctors and other clinical people, however, I remember my days as a tech, I used to love fixing PCs for the mental health clinics because... they had all the best toys. I think one of em gave me a "Wellbutrin brain" (plush brain with a "Welbutrin" stamp on the bottom).

Now, we actually sometimes have to send things back to well meaning vendors, we are not even allowed to accept a free pen. Gone are the days when consultants could take us out to lunch on their companies dime. It doesn't even matter that we are tech folks and don't make purchasing decisions.

In fact, they have even gone so far as to come up with complicated rules as to whether or not we can eat at vendor events that supply free food. Seriously. The company took the fact that gifts could influence a persons decisions related to a product, and went so far to the other side, that we made the rules so complicated that people now think the company is being stupid. Excellent way to develop respect for doing the right thing... by taking it so far that its stupid.

It's not (always) bribery, but just a PR stunt. They don't do these things for better review scores, but for media attention.Serious, what good is "rancid, rotting meat mixed with spent shell casings, teeth, broken glasses and dog tags" or "brass knuckles"?If it's not cash, or some other thing they can cash in then it's not really bribery.

It's not (always) bribery, but just a PR stunt. They don't do these things for better review scores, but for media attention.

Reviews really aren't about the numbers though... They're about the publicity. Yes, sure, folks talk about what score some game got from some site... But the review itself is more than a number. It's generally several pages of description, a bunch of screenshots, opinion bits, memorable quotes from the dialogue... That's all PR. Even if a game gets a bad score, some folks will buy it because of a cool screenshot in a review.

Serious, what good is "rancid, rotting meat mixed with spent shell casings, teeth, broken glasses and dog tags" or "brass knuckles"?If it's not cash, or some other thing they can cash in then it's not really bribery.

Pretty much all of that could be converted to cash on ebay. People will buy j

Yes, they even say in the summary that the reasoning behind these gifts is not so much bribery to ensure a good score but merely to get the gifts themselves (and therefore, by extension, the games) talked about a little bit more in the media. I guess "bribery" was used in the title because it sounds more salacious than "gifts", although if someone sent me a crate of rotting meat I think I'd be more inclined to call the police.

But what is the rest of the coverage besides recycled PR anyway? Personally I just try and get a sense of a game I'm interested in and then stop looking at coverage on it. I just want to see the basic idea of the game and what mechanics it uses, as soon as I'm interested then I cut off coverage because I don't want anything spoiled, not even the introduction. In other media I also avoid trailers because of how much they will spoil the actual movie for example. The way a game starts is meant to draw you in and intrigue you, and if you hear a lot about it beforehand, it doesn't have the same impact when you actually play the game.

There have been situations with games such as Super Smash Bros Brawl where they drip feed you with information, every day you see a new character, or a new move, or a new item you will be using in the game. By the time the game comes out I'm sick of it already and I don't even want to see it anymore. Or sometimes development time will drag on and paying attention to a game's coverage is like torturing yourself, such as with Dragon Quest IX or Duke Nukem Forever. In that case, coverage will often turn me off of a game, and if I already know I want to play it, what's the point? I've got better things to do.

Giving someone a $2 piece of swag with a review copy of a product is OK, but once the value of "gifts" exceeds some amount then it becomes an inducement. Even more insidious is the implicit threat that if a product does not get a good review, more goodies and early access to future products won't be forthcoming.

it's widespread among all industries - which is probably why there are so few reviewers who have anything approaching credibility. (not sure about what it's like in your country) In the UK there is a standard for travel reviewers that they should declare who paid for the trip / accommodation that's being reviewed - maybe it's time any product review carried a qualifier as to what benefits or freebies the reviewer received, too.

As it is the only real indicator of whether a product is worth a dam' is from people who have bought it with their own money. Having someone who had a product dropped in their lap, telling you that it's definitely worth the money (what money?) is so hollow as to be laughable. Hopefully as more bona-fide owners write about their experiences, all these media-tart reviewers will be shown up for what they really are: entertainers.

Well, your gaming blog needs to seriously ROCK! If you don't influence enough of the worlds population of gamers into making decisions about game purchases, you're likely never to get a bribe, or even a goody for that matter.

No, it's just that you have to have patience and build yourself a reputation (a step businesses always seem to want to skip over), and then you get those pre-release privileges, but only for games you like. It goes like this

Game X comes out. You buy it on release day and post a favorable review.Game X part 2 comes out. You buy it on release day and post a favorable review.Game X part 3 is about to come out. The manufacturer says "hey, we like this guy's previous reviews". A week before release, you get a re

I've been doing game reviews for almost a decade, and while I receive free games in abundance (and Microsoft has been trying to send me a XB360 for several years now, but I only do PC game reviews), I've never received cash or other swag. in fact, most recently, I get Steam download codes or similar, and I don't even get a physical copy of the game anymore.

I was playing your game for a short while after seeing you talk about it on here a couple of months ago. It was fun for about a week and then it was just boring and repetitive. I hope I can come back to it in a few years and find that it's become more than what it is right now.

Just this weekend we had a massive update that's designed to allow for replayability with a wide variety of options: restrictions, rewards, perming skills and changing classes, a chance to strategically replay quests, and leaderboards so players can compete against each other for different styles of play. It's the main point I'd been aiming for since I started development. That's why my sig changed to say we've gone gamma, because up until this point I would have said the game wasn't "complete enough" and w

A book (that I even reviewed on Slashdot [slashdot.org]) has a section on just this sort of thing you can read here [diveintohtml5.org]. It tells you how to use HTML5 microdata to mark up reviews so that search engines and sites (like metacritic) can utilize your HTML to build indexes of reviews.

Slashdot's always been a little behind the curve but considering what their review form looks like, you'd think it'd be a trivial thing to have the end product wrap the review in microdata so they too are suddenly influencing metacritic and com

I think we must be doing it wrong around here... we usually can't even get games before the release date, much less get free rotting meat.

Even by the extremely low standards of video game journalism [tumblr.com], Slashdot can't get any respect. Maybe you should think about focusing on the writing/editing. Or fix the awful bugs on this site that have been around for... well, decades at this point. (How about a rich text comment field? Let's join 2005!)

Adding a rich text command field is useless for the half dozen of HTML tags you can insert. Adding more tags would be counter-productive - the existing ones already let you structure your post, which is the important part; enabling style changes for each comment would make the site unreadable.

So that's not really important. I would prefer if they fixed the CSS for Idle - the comment textarea still doesn't use the whole width.

Of course I should have expected the grumpy "we hate technology even though we visit a tech site" and "we absolutely hate anything that makes software more usable" crowd to support that idea, so big mistake on my part.

I'm not opposed to it (having menus for formatting, not for styling, that is), I just don't care. But since there are plenty of bugs to fix, I'd rather they concentrated on them than adding (what I see as useless) features.

Back in the day when everybody read Byte Chaos Manor was probably the most important place outside of the cover you could be.Jerry Pournell wrote what we would the column based on what he used.His system was simple. Send me your stuff and I get to keep it all.If he didn't like your stuff he would say so or just not write about it.If he did like your stuff it was fantastic for you.Borland as a company pretty much was born when Jerry Pournell wrote about how great this cheap Pascal compiler called TruboPascal was. Borland to a loan for their first full page ad based just on that column.

Now that would be considered not legit but at the time no one minded. Truth is that his reviews where brutally honest and very good.

I don't play games very often anymore, but I've found the easiest way to get an honest opinion of a game is to do the following:

Wait for a few months after the game is released (initial or pre-release reviews are always too positive)

Go to a game review aggregator site (metacritic, gamerankings, etc)

Start reading from the lowest-scoring review, up

That works well.

Reviewers who scored a game low were not compensated by the publisher, almost definitely had to buy the game themselves, and usually point out legitimate flaws instead of glossing over them. It's a great way to innoculate yourself against hype.

I don't play games very often anymore, but I've found the easiest way to get an honest opinion of a game is to do the following:

* Wait for a few months after the game is released (initial or pre-release reviews are always too positive)
* Go to a game review aggregator site (metacritic, gamerankings, etc)
* Start reading from the lowest-scoring review, up

That works well.

Somewhat earlier in the release cycle, I've found torrent seeder/peer counts and especially torrent site comments help separate the wheat from the chaff. P2P sharers are brutally honest, especially if the software isn't even worth stealing or simply doesn't do what its supposed to. I have in fact purchased and paid for software on this basis.

Personally I feel you can't beat a demo, but failing that find a few reviewers who seem to share your likes and dislikes (an easy way to do this is to read some of their past reviews for games you loved/hated and see if they gave the same reasoning) and follow them. They won't always agree with each other or with you, but if you find four or five you can average out the reviews. The metacritic method is also good as a last resort, but even if you read in reverse order you're not guaranteeing that the review

Another reason to wait is that a lot of games tend to be fairly buggy on release and this can siphon off a lot of joy. I bought Civilization V and while it's not a bad game and I haven't had to deal with crashes, the game balance is horribly off and it doesn't feel as polished as Civ IV with both expansions. I like the direction the game has taken, but it needs a lot of polish and the AI really needs to fixed. The computer is horrible at combat and seems to do other odd things such as acting perfectly frien

You can do this with many products. The high-scoring long reviews of a mobile phone are probably written by fanbois, the short ones which list the defects are the ones written by people who know what matters.

I do something similar, but different. I think low outlier review scores often has to do with reviewers using a point deduction scheme, which isn't all that indicative of how fun a game is.

What I do instead is I go to metacritic and note both the aggregate score for critics reviews and the aggregate score for user reviews. Critics reviews can be paid for, or sometimes nitpicky, whereas user reviews can be a gut reaction, based on superficial impressions, and susceptible to 'fanboi/hater' extremes. However,

Aggregator sites like Metacritic and Gamerankings don't really work unless you just use them to find reviews to look at (you mention reading the reviews which is great, but many don't). These sites misinterpret scores, they have the task of taking all of the different scoring methods and getting the average score, but not every site uses the same ranking method. For example, at 1up they use a letter grade, from A to F, with C being "Good", B being "Great", and A being "Excellent". Metacritic however thin

Yes. You mention it in your post, but the trend of only using the very upmost part of the scale is stupid. A game that really sucks might still get 40%. Not that score matters that much (read the review instead).

When reviewers give 100% [psillustrated.com] you just can't take it seriously. 100% is divine perfection, or should at least be reserved for a real-life Matrix. The reviewer even guzzles "The only trick now is to see how they can top themselves with the next game". Yes, that would be a trick indeed, Spinal Tap jokes as

I do something similar, except I just read the top five and bottom five first. If that's not enough to make an informed decision I keep going until I feel confident the game is worth buying or passing or until I run out of reviews to read.

You ever notice on Metacritic how the higher the marketing budget of the game, the greater the positive disparity between Metascore and user score? But in contrast small indie games or low budget releases are usually scored evenly. Of course it could just be a combination of hype backlash, bribery and reviewers suffering from an unusual vulnerability to marketing ploys.

Many reviewers just refuse them and don't let it influence their decision. There aren't just tchotchkes knick-knacks and gewgaws, but actual games given in order to review them, and some places keep them, but many don't. At Joystiq [joystiq.com] for example, they pay for trips on their own dime to attend previews, demos and conferences. They also give away reviewed games in contests, and refuse any extras. At 1up.com:

"We do not accept any gifts--such as video iPods, World Series tickets, cash (in the form of contest prizes)...all of which were actually offered to us at one point. But we are allowed to keep cheap, promotional items, so you'll see game posters or XXXXXXXL T-shirts around our offices. We also keep the games that the companies send us, but EGM's rule is to put one away for the office library copy, and the rest get evenly distributed to staffers who will actually play them (absolutely no trading them in or eBaying them for profit or gain of any sort)."

The rules are different at different outlets but you'll find most try to think about this subject and let their audience know how it affects or doesn't affect them. Giant Bomb [giantbomb.com] are headed up by people who left after a related incident at their previous employer. One of the founders fought to defend their review against a publisher and editor who wanted them to give it a more glowing review, and their previous job [wikipedia.org] was terminated for doing so, certain people quit in disgust and joined together to form a new site.

I used to write game reviews. I was provided the games by the site, and got to keep them in lieu of payment. On occasion, I would buy a game and review it too, but more often than not, I received the games for free. I'm not sure if the guy who owned the web site got them for free or if he bought them, but there was never any pressure for me to give a game a positive review.

Really? I always attributed it to outright silliness (or perhaps pride) on the publisher's part. I mean, imagine you just made some kind of hardcore cover-based shooter with, oh I don't know dinosaurs as handguns. Work with me here. This hypothetical dino-gun game is your pride and joy, and you want to make a good impression on a small subset of important reviewers. You don't want to bribe them, exactly, but you want them to know that you think highly of your game, and of their capacity as high-power review

When you're looking at reviews, you can almost always ignore the Five Star and One Star reviews. Five stars usually don't provide insight (giddy cheerleading) and one star reviews are usually hyperbolic reactions to problems.

If only that worked in the computer / games world. ISTM reviews start at 3 stars, just for providing a cardboard box. If there's anything in it, the product automatically gets 4 stars, and if they have an advertisement in the magazine or website then 5 stars is a shoo in.
I have seen mini-reviews of products that the reviewer admitted didn't even work get a 3* rating on the basis of what the product description said (and an assurance from the supplier that the example they got "must have been a flook"). it'

I've thought a few times that I ought to get into the review business, just for the free games. That there are other bits of entertaining swag just makes it more appealing. I think I'd be willing to write a few short essays in exchange for a lot of free entertainment. Heck, I'd probably write an entire thesis to get one of those gigantic swords.

What happens is I can never decide whether I should sell out completely to get the most stuff, or I should try to maintain integrity and relish the occasional oppo

I'm not sure how posting "I'm torn between integrity and lack of it but haven't done either" means I'm necessarily a bad person with worthless opinions. I'd say facing moral dilemmas makes me an average person. Did you only read the first paragraph of the the post before jumping to your judgmental conclusion? I can certainly see why you'd want to hide as an Anonymous Coward while you do that, though. You're discounting me for no reason, but hiding so I can't discount you. Hrmph.

I wish the article really went more into depth. IMHO Publishers these days are not all that what they are cracked up to be , bunch of marketing whores. Look at the fiasco with CIV5 from 2k almost unplayable on most non english windows systems and the crash issues with most nvidia cards. http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88969 [2kgames.com]

Every major gaming magazine has given it almost 8/10 , while actually (as I long time civ player) I don't think it is all that great except for the perty graphics. Dumbe

The crazy stuff is sent because it generates hype. Bloggers rush to post about every little thing they receive and routinely gush about how awesome it is that they have it in with the publishers. Publishers bombard publications with all kinds of assorted gifts and marketing crap to foster this sense of good will, they give them special behind-the-scenes access, they offer exclusive interviews. This is all done in an effort to foster this sense of goodwill on the part of reviewers. There's

Still, this seems like a story slot that could have been better served covering something else...

That's why I, as the submitter, tagged it as idle & humor. Because that's all it is. Something that's funny enough to read when you're idle. CmdrTaco put it under games and he, as the editor at the moment, has that choice. I mean, is it any less newsworthy than your submission on PS3 Trophies [slashdot.org]? At least your attention is being brought to potential bribery here.

As always: If you're using the new index, there is an edit button in the upper left near the 'Stories' tab that will allow you hit 'Excl

That's right...I'm a fanboy who hates Sony. I've only owned every gaming system Sony has ever released...as well as every gaming system Nintendo has released (minus all of the Game n Watches) and both gaming systems Microsoft has released. Just like how I owned an SNES and a Genesis way back in the day.

Yup...I'm a fanboy alright. A fanboy of video games. My allegiance is to fun, not a particular brand.

I've made my case against fanboys [livingwithanerd.com], and I've presented a shortened version of my gaming history [livingwithanerd.com], which spanned many gaming platforms from many different manufacturers; that includes Atari, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and PC gaming.

Well I don't mind slashvertisements if it is in the scope of intereseting, pressing todays issues and news for nerds. Games certainly is one of them and it is journalistic independance. You might not thinkg of games reviewing as journalism, but that's a different topic.

Question: why do you hide -1 comments? sure you'll get the inevitable "nigger nigger" trolls, but I've found in heated discussions often the best posts are negative rated, because they dared to go against groupthink. Often metamods will fix them, but by then it is off the front page and the groupthink trolls have done their job. Better IMHO to just see it all and ignore the obvious trolls, it isn't like they aren't as easy to spot as old "In soviet Russia" jokes here.

There are only so many stories that make it to the front page of Slashdot every day...my point is, why use up one of those "slots" with a retrospective on stories, some of which are well over a year old, instead of something that covers modern events?

Why not just ignore the stories that you don't consider news? It seems slashdot is often at least a few days behind whenever I talk about stories with one of my geeky friends, but I don't mind much as I don't often browse any other tech news/aggregation sites really.

I just was getting frustrated at the number of times I've seen you post near the top with some really obvious observation. I'd seriously just prefer you to say "first post!". I probably have done/will do this from time to time too, but most of t

Seriously though...you're right. It is a bit overboard. Tell ya what, I'll keep my mouth shut unless I have something good to contribute (or if there's a joke just hangin' out there, waiting to be posted)

It's integral to my job, actually...business ops tells me what they want, I translate that into tech speak, and tell the production team what needs to be done. I also do the opposite, taking the production team's technical specifications and translating them into "business speak".